Thursday, December 3, 2009

Adventures in Driving

Murphy’s Law says “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Pastor’s Tony’s Corollary goes like this: “If your car is going to break down, it will always happen when you are out of town.” This happened to me on Thanksgiving when we were, yes, out of town. However, God helps his people. Every time my car has broken down out of town, it happened in such a way that help was readily available.

A whirring sound started coming out of the engine compartment when we were on our way to Thanksgiving dinner, so I knew something was wrong. However, the car wasn’t squealing or screeching, so I figured we’d get home all right.

After dinner, my wife and I were driving out of a neighborhood we weren’t familiar with (we had spent Thanksgiving with my son’s girlfriend’s parents and I had used the GPS to find their place). I asked if I could follow my son out of that neighborhood so we wouldn’t take a wrong turn in the dark.

As we were driving out of the neighborhood at about 10:30 at night, the car was still making the noise. All of a sudden, it made a high-pitched squeal, and then “boing!” At that point, the lights dimmed and I lost the power steering, although the engine was still running. I knew where we were, since we had just come out of the neighborhood and were on a road I was familiar with. I knew there was a church immediately ahead, so I turned into the church’s parking lot. My son, having seen us turn, came to see what was wrong.

He drove us home (45 minutes away), and I had the car towed the next day. The dealer fixed it that same day and we could pick it up later in the afternoon. While it was inconvenient, look at how God made it less dangerous and more tolerable than it could have been:

-the car broke down at just the right place where we weren’t blocking traffic or stuck along the highway late at night.
-the engine was still running, so I could make it into the parking lot.
-my son was right there, and could give us a ride home.
-the dealer could fix the car the next day.
-it was the tension pulley that broke, not an expensive part (I thought it was the alternator).

So God may not always spare us from bad things happening to us, but he often mitigates the negative effects. I also believe that God spares us from many things that we are not aware of because they didn’t happen. So rather than blame God for bad things when they come, thank him that it wasn’t any worse.

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